Sectorgame

Oh wow, that guncam view looks like an interesting feature. Good work on the 'HUD' there, too. And that Orestes upgrade sure is looking hot

Congrats on the thesis!

Fortnightly update time.

Well, as you can see above, things're moving at pace, which is good, as we're looking at about a two week time limit for the beta completion date. Obviously, most of what's been worked on is up there and visible, but there hve been a couple of significant developments in thepast couple of days:

1 - Those Orestes greebles have now been UVed and textured, and the whole ship has been given an AO bake. It looks really, really cool, but I think we'll hold off on pictures for now - it still needs a couple of turrets added, and then the model-animation Pof-Fu for those landing legs/docking tube, but we should be able to get some ingame pics (or possibly footage) very very soon.

2 -I've more or less completed the mods on the "Guncam mission", pictured above. When I say "more or less", the stuff that's missing is the debrief (since it's part 2 of a 2 part Red-Alert, this is a bit more complex than most missions, I'll get this working ASAP) and the final funky docking sequence that involves the Orestes - with the final HTL pof so close, I'd be better off doing that with the final model. Moving on to further FREDding steadily over the next couple of weeks - I'm now pretty confident of hitting that beta date.

No new pics for this post, since, frankly, there's not much to show - the new stuff is in the pics up there. But I'll probably go on another screenshot binge once I complete this round of FREDding, and there's another existing ship (+ Greebles) on the way too, so keep an eye out for that.

Updatery!

ME GUSTA

I saw what you didz therez. LOVEZ IT!!!

Just glorious *___*

OK, so you've no doubt noticed that we're well into 2012 and yet, no beta. Well, that's true. And unfortunately there's not a lot I can do about it at this point. VA's been busy with family christmas stuff, and there's one model we need to make a couple of non-critical missions (Blackwood station). The good news is that most of the hard-slog work of UVing it to bake the tiles into a single map that doesn't break the engine has been done, so now it's just a matter of conversion.

That said, I can't blame VA for this one - even if he had gotten the model to me on time, I hit one hell of a wall around christmas time and I still have no way around it. Our final mission is just refusing to work the way it ought to - I'm very likely going to have to rebuild it, which is damned annoying, but hopefully not too big of a hurdle - we can test everything but that mission, and throw this one out there at the end.

Otherwise, I've been squashing bugs with the determination of a five year old sociopath, and, with the exception of a few days of burnout, FREDding pretty solidly. So, I guess, while we did miss our deadline, all I can ask is that you bear with us for a few more days. The Beta is coming, and a few weeks after that we'll have the campaign ready.

And then, boom. Just like that, Darius solved the problem. The solution is sexp heavy, but it works, which is pretty much the greatest thing ever right now.

Honestly, you have no idea how ridiculously happy this has made me.

So...this means beta is coming soon?

Very soon. I'm waiting for Blackwood station from VA, and I can finalize the last couple of missions. Then we'll have an internal "Alpha" (more like a 0.9 version of the beta), which will be run through by me, VA, and my brother (Admiral LSD). Once the obvious bugs we find there are dealt with, we'll move on to the true beta, which'll have the extensive, mission taxing vugtesting done on it. While that's going on we'll be finalizing non-balance affecting assets (Texs, mostly). The net result should be a release in Q1 2012.

Blackwood be nearly done! Made a successful conversion and ingame test (though turns out that if you have too many debris pieces, your whole ship refuses to collide with anything at all. Who knew?), so now I'm just finishing off POF data and a shine/normal map.

turns out that if you have too many debris pieces, your whole ship refuses to collide with anything at all. Who knew?

Ahh, the many quirks of FS!

VA threw this up on Youtube to assist with getting some new (old) features back into the FSO codebase. I'd like to pretend I risked life and limb to get this secret video to the public. In truth, he sent me the link on IRC and didn't try to hide it. But what a boring story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bq_xe2XQ ... e=youtu.be

That right there? That's awesome.

Full update in the coming days, some cool developments to report.

Suddenly the "Orestes" dock on the MediaVPs Aeolus makes a lot more sense!

Woah, this thing is absolutely awesome. I love what you did with that dock slowly opening as the ship was docking...